Immortality Wars (digital novel)

June 20, 2012

author |

Joe Tripician

year published |

2012

What is it about the Singularity that causes such controversy and conflict? In an age where nanotechnology and stem cells could greatly extend human life, and where human-to-computer mind upload is discussed as casually as the latest iPad app, the Singularity may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Award-winning author and filmmaker Joe Tripician offers up a tantalizing, satric and cautionary tale of one such vision.

Immortality Wars features Private Detective Harry Tidbit who is hired to save the State from terrorist attacks. One day Harry learns that his employers have plans to kill him, along with an entire generation of new immortals.

With help from an emergent intelligence, Harry repels the assaults, and perfects mind upload as a cure for his brother’s terminal illness. But when competing factions vie to claim his discovery, Harry becomes their prime target.

Immortality Wars paints a wicked portrait of the near-future, one where technology’s goals require wars to bring them to creation. In this world human ingenuity is a saving grace, and immortality is not necessarily forever.

Comments (2)

Even if physical life extension were to become available, most brains would still go bad beyond about 100 years. Keeping the brain healthy is going to be far more difficult than keeping the heart beating and the kidneys filtering. One big problem is that the brain cannot be taken offline for more than a few seconds before hypoxia begins to cause damage. If you could not shut your computer down for cleaning and repairing without destroying all the programs and data, computers would certainly not last for 100 years!

This is to assume that the brain isn’t re-engineered mechanically and operates via artificial intelligence. If we could recreate the entire brain, bit by bit, and then start replacing each piece of your brain bit by bit by said re-engineered brain, then who’s to say that we won’t be able to accomplish methods of solving the very problems a biological brain faces, as you’d pointed out?